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Tales from the Terminal RoomSeptember 1999 Issue No. 2 |
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Please Note: This is an archive copy of the newsletter. The information and links that it contains are not updated.
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Tales from the Terminal Room ISSN 1467-338X September 1999 Issue No. 2 Editor: Karen Blakeman Published by: RBA Information Services Tales from the Terminal Room (TFTTR) is a monthly newsletter, with the exception of July and August, which are published as a single issue. TFTTR includes reviews and comparisons of information sources and search tools; updates to the RBA Web site Business Sources and other useful resources; dealing with technical and access problems on the Net; and news of RBA's training courses and publications. In this issue:
Review of AlexaStandard search techniques try and locate documents or Web pages that contain your search terms. Slap in a few words and the engines are supposed to come up with at least a handful of relevant documents in the first 20 or so of your results. Even using advanced search techniques such as plus signs to make terms mandatory, putting phrases in double quote marks and Boolean searching do not always work, though. A totally different approach is to take a known, relevant page and find others that have linked to it, the assumption being that similar or related pages will link to one another. Several of the standard search engines - AltaVista, Infoseek, Google - offer a link command. For example, if you wanted to find out who has links to the UK Online User Group Home Page, the command would be: link:www.ukolug.org.uk The main drawback with this is that you will also pick up links within the UKOLUG site itself, but AltaVista and Infoseek allow you to exclude those links by including a -url: command, for example: link:www.ukolug.org.uk -url:www.ukolug.org.uk Hotbot also has a link option, but you have to enter the entire URL, for example http://www.ukolug.org.uk/, into the search box and select "links to this URL" from the Look for: pull down menu. Instead of using a search engine you could use a service such as Alexa (http://www.alexa.com/). Alexa offers a free Web navigation service that can provide information about each site that you visit, together with links to related sites. Alexa crawls the Net much in the same way as search engines but it analyses the links between pages rather than the content. The index is further refined by looking at which links users actually follow when presented with a list of related sites, and how users move between pages. For example, if thousands of Alexa users go directly from site A to site B, the two sites are likely to be related in some way. Alexa as a separate application Both Netscape 4 and IE 5 have incorporated the Alexa service into the browser. If you have an earlier version of either browser you can download a separate Alexa toolbar from the Alexa Home page (http://www.alexa.com/). Once installed on your PC, the toolbar sits on top or at the bottom of your browser. When a Web page is displayed in your browser, clicking on the link section in the Alexa toolbar gives you a list of sites that Alexa believes are similar in content. Alexa also gives you general information on the site such as the owner, date established, popularity of the site amongst Alexa users, speed of the site, freshness (how often a site is updated), number of pages on the site and number of links into the site. In most cases, the separate Alexa service seems to be reasonably accurate. For example, for the Railtrack UK train timetables the related links included:
It also came up with reasonable links for the UK Online User Group including the Institute of Information Scientists (its parent body), UK Office for Library Networking, NISS, UK Serials Group and Sconul. However it failed to come up with information on UKOLUG's site owners, simply saying "No Data", and claimed that there are only two Web pages on the site when in fact there are in the region of 30-40 pages. The number of links into the page is a little conservative at 22. A quick check of www.ukolug.org.uk using the link command in the main search engines and excluding links within the site came up with:
The general message here is do not accept without question the information that Alexa presents for a site. It doesn't always work but it can be a very useful, additional tool for helping you identify similar or related sites. Alexa as part of Internet Explorer 5 In Internet Explorer 5, display your Web page and click on Tools in the menu bar followed by Show Related Links and the Alexa data is displayed to the left of the Web page. First impressions suggest that this is exactly the same service as used by the Alexa toolbar, but I have found that some of the data may vary. For example, for the UKOLUG site the IE 5 based service gave an indication that the traffic through the UKOLUG site was three times greater than that suggested by the separate Alexa toolbar. The related links were identical though, so it seems that the same link database is used but that the two services - IE 5's Related Links and the separate Alexa toolbar -are on separate servers. Alexa as part of Netscape 4 In Netscape 4, there is a What's Related link in the Location toolbar. When a page is displayed, clicking on the What's Related button gives a list of related sites. The help files on the Netscape Web site say that this service is provided "in partnership with Alexa". For the Railtrack site the results were very similar to IE 5 and the Alexa toolbar, but for UKOLUG it came back with "No related links available". I repeated the What's related for UKOLUG on several occasions over three days but still got the same negative result. I tried a range of other sites to see if it was related to some problem with the UKOLUG site itself. All three services gave results similar to one another for Aslib and my own RBA site. I then tried the Leatherhead Food Research Association Home Page and the What's related gave me a list of genealogy sites! About a third of the sites that I eventually tested (around 30-40) gave odd results so something appears to be very wrong with the Netscape version of Alexa Alternatives to the Alexa Related Links Google has long had a link command but has recently introduced a service called GoogleScout. Next to each result in your standard search results list is a GoogleScout link that provides a list of sites containing related information. The links are sometimes similar to those suggested by Alexa and occasionally include more pages from the same site. If you have the URL of a page, you can go directly to a list of related pages by using the related command. For example: related:www.ukolug.org.uk Excite has a "Search for more documents like this one" link next to each entry in your results list; in Webcrawler, if you display the summaries, there is a "Similar Pages" link; and Infoseek has a "Find similar pages" link next to each result. With Euroferret, there is a box next to each result and if you check a box next to a relevant page and click on the Find button, Euroferret uses those documents to find similar ones. I have rarely found any of these to be of use. All too often they just pull back pages from the same site or list pages that appear to have no connection whatsoever, in terms of content or links, with your first document. Conclusion
Special Note: Alexa is based in the US and all three of the versions outlined here connect to a US server. If you are based in the UK or Europe, and are charged for transatlantic traffic, you may prefer not to use the service in any of its forms. Also, the toolbar version which is constantly generating traffic regardless of whether you request information on page and has been known to dramatically slow down local networks that are already close to overload. Tools mentioned in this article Alexa (http://www.alexa.com/) Information on linked and related
pages. RBA Business Sources on the Net(http://www.rba.co.uk/sources/) New linksDirectories (http://www.rba.co.uk/sources/directs.htm) Bankers Almanac (http://www.bankersalmanac.com/) The Quick Search option enables you to search by one of the following: bank name, country, town, address, codes, telecoms numbers, people, or history. The History option gives you a list of "Event types" from which to choose, for example name change, taken over, failed and this can be combined with a date range and a bank name if you wish. The Power Search allows you to search on any combination of Total Assets, Capital, Profit & Loss, Performance Ratios, Loans, World and Country Rankings, Services, Type of Bank and Country. Within Power Search you can also sort your documents by one of fourteen criteria. The in-depth data includes name, address, status, ownership, correspondents, SSIs, domestic branches, foreign branches, brief financials and subsidiaries, all of which can be viewed separately or as part of the "Full Details". The Group Structure option shows the relationship between all the companies in the group. In addition to the Almanac there is a free section called Bankworld giving
access to a list of the World's top 50 banks, market survey extracts,
conferences and exhibitions, links to relevant organisations and associations,
credit rating definitions, financial journals and useful links. Stock Markets and Company Financials (http://www.rba.co.uk/sources/stocks.htm) Directories (http://www.rba.co.uk/sources/directs.htm)Hoppenstedt German Company Database (http://www.companydatabase.de/) There is an English language search screen (click on the flag at the bottom of the home page for the English language version) with a total of eight search criteria: company name, town/city, postcode, state, industry (NACE), sales, employees and products. The free Brief Profile (log on as a guest) gives you company name, address, telephone, fax and telex numbers. If you have a subscription, the full Profiles also give names, titles, and functions of key management personnel; branch offices and factories; products; import/export activities. Financial data if available includes sales, numbers of employees, legal status, the year in which the company was founded, banking addresses, equity capitalisation, subsidiaries and branch offices, share holdings in affiliated companies, land ownership, vehicle fleets, membership of associations, and detailed financial data in the case of banks. Subscriptions start at DM 15 per document and there are "full-status" subscriptions that give company wide access with charges that vary according to the number of workstations. Statistics and Market Data (http://www.rba.co.uk/sources/stats.htm) Internet Statistics and Surveys NUA: Internet Strategic Consultancy and Web Publishing Solutions (http://www.nua.ie/) DomainStats.com (http://www.domainstats.com/) StatMarket - Internet Statistics and User Trends (http://www.statmarket.com/) GVU's Center's WWW User Surveys (http://www.gvu.gatech.edu/gvu/user_surveys/) Updated Services Stock Markets and Company FinancialsE*TRADE (http://www.etrade.co.uk/) Corporate Reports Ltd (http://www.corpreports.co.uk/)
Company data is free but you need your ID and password to access it. The data includes address, telephone and fax numbers, activities, status, sector, number of employees. The Summary Reports and Accounts are also free but you must have a plugin from AT&T called DjVu (pronounced "déjà vu") installed. (There is a download link for the program). The Annual Reports are available by subscription only and are also in DjVu format. DjVu documents look like PDFs but are much smaller in size, which means that they do not take as long to download and can be loaded onto PCs that may not have sufficient resources to handle PDFs. For the Annual Reports, there are three levels of subscription. A single user subscription which gives unlimited access to all the companies on the site for a full 12 months costs GBP 50.00. The second, costing GBP 10 provides full access to the Annual Reports and Accounts of 3 companies for 30 days. For both of these, payment must be made online using a credit card via a secure server page. The Multi User Licence for 5, 10 and 20 users costs GBP 200, GBP 400 and GBP 600 respectively. Payment can be made by credit card or invoice. These things are sent to try us!The Mystery of the Disappearing DUN IconThose of us who use Dial-up Networking (DUN) to connect to the Internet will be familiar with the icon of two linked terminals that appears in the system tray at the bottom of our screens when a connection is established. The icon disappears when we disconnect from the online service. Thus it serves as a reminder that we are online and, for users in the UK, incurring telephone charges. However, the icon can vanish into thin air. Two people contacted me, independently, about a problem they had had after installing software for a pay-as-you-go Internet service. The icon disappeared and did not reappear when they uninstalled the service and its software. This meant that my two correspondents had no quick and easy means of checking whether or not they were online (they both had internal modems). Why the service should wish to remove this useful feature you will have to work out for yourselves, but suffice to say that the service charges its customers from 1 pence per minute to 4 pence per minute depending on the time of day it is used, and this is on TOP of the telephone charges. So how does one restore the icon? Either click on the My Computer icon on your desktop and select the Dial-up Networking folder, or click on Start, select Programs, followed by Accessories and then Dial-up Networking. From the menu bar of the DUN program group, select Connections and then Settings. A "General" options screen should appear. Under the section "When establishing a Dial-up connection:" make sure that there is a tick in the box next to "Show an icon on taskbar after connection" by clicking on the box. The icon should now reappear in the system tray when you connect via DUN. Gizmo of the MonthDUN ManagerThis very useful tool keeps tabs on the cost of your Internet telephone charges and logs connection problems. Once installed, DUN Manager sits in the Windows 95, Windows 98, NT4 or Windows 2000 system tray as an icon and monitors your use of DUN. You can have a flashing a currency symbol as a reminder while online and associate sound effects with "events" such as dialling, successful connection (the default sound is the sound of cash till!), and disconnection. You can also have a sound effect played periodically while online as a reminder. The default is every 10 minutes with a cuckoo clock going off. I changed this to 20 minutes with the sound of a small bell, but my colleague decided on the police siren (I suspect that within the next day or so he will be lynched by those sitting next to him). You can have performance graphs showing transmit and receive data speeds during and after the connection with the data optionally logged for later analysis. This can be useful if you want to check how an ftp transfer is progressing. For example, if the speeds are steadily dropping you may prefer to disconnect and try again; and you can set up DUN Manager to automatically drop the connection and retry if the transfer falls below a certain rate. A scheduler allows connections to be automatically started at specified times and repeated until a particular time. Once connected, the scheduler will run an application or perform various other specified tasks. For example, a task will change a connection telephone number at weekends to a Freephone number for instance so that you can make use of any special offers that are available. The connection activity log stores all progress messages for each connection such as the phone number dialled, session duration and performance statistics. The most useful part of this package for me is the session/cost log which keeps a monthly tally of dial-up networking sessions including telephone call cost. This is ideal for checking usage or if you have to charge costs to your users or clients. Each DUN connection that you have set up can be associated with a different telecom tariff to allow for discount schemes, and there are tariffs for over 40 different countries. For the UK there are tariffs from over 27 different operators. You can even compare what the cost of your calls would have using alternative telecom operators or tariff, by associating the tariff in question with the connections and pressing the Recalculate button. All in all, an excellent utility. DUN Manager is shareware, and developed by Magenta Systems Ltd. It may be evaluated for 30 days, after which it must be registered. Registration costs GBP 25 which is about USD 41 or Euro 38. A copy of the program can be downloaded from http://www.magsys.co.uk/dunman/ TrainingOctober 7th, Business Information on the Internet URL of this page - http://www.rba.co.uk/tfttr/archives/1999/sept1999.shtml TFTTR Contact InformationKaren Blakeman, RBA Information Services ArchivesTFTTR archives: http://www.rba.co.uk/tfttr/archives/index.shtml Subscribe and UnsubscribeTo subscribe to the newsletter fill in the online registration form at http://www.rba.co.uk/tfttr/index.shtml To unsubscribe, use the registration form at http://www.rba.co.uk/tfttr/index.shtml and check the unsubscribe radio button. Privacy StatementSubscribers' details are used only to enable distribution of the newsletter Tales from the Terminal Room. The subscriber list is not used for any other purpose, nor will it be disclosed by RBA or made available in any form to any other individual, organisation or company.
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| This page was last updated on 23rd September 1999 | 1999 |
